After a long hiatus due to unexpected life events, I have decided to revive this personal website. Hopefully this time it will be updated regularly.

To kick off, I would like to share (with permission) these two student stop motion projects from my Intro to Global Animation course that I just taught last spring.

I have been teaching this course for three years now and have to admit that the last iteration may be the most enjoyable to teach yet. I had a good group of students who were very active and attentive. In general, they also did a good job with their final project. The two projects that I’m featuring here are the ones that stand out for me the most.

The first project is called Media Pressures. It’s a critique of our contemporary social media culture and its attention economy. This one is technically the most polished compared to the other projects in the class although I made comment to the group that their stop motion would be much better with music soundtrack.

The second one is called Old Town Road. Story-wise, it plays with the usual western movie trope. What I like about this stop motion project is because the students who made this tried to apply what they have learned about the concepts of “limited animation” and “cartoon physics,” and I think they quite nailed it. Plus, it’s also sort of a reimagination of Lil Nas X’s song 🙂

PS. I had to upload my students’ videos to Youtube since Vimeo is (still) blocked in my home country, hence the downgraded quality. Once I am back in the States, I will switch them with the version on Vimeo.